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Gordon Jenkins is the Time for Lunch Campaign Coordinator at Slow Food USA. He is the Director of Eat-Ins.org and was an organizer for Slow Food Nation 2008. He has served as an assistant to Alice Waters and as a student farmer and writer for the Yale Sustainable Food Project.

The Guide for Beginning Farmers

Greenhorn is a word I expect I’ll hear fairly often in years to come. A greenhorn, according to Severine von Tscharner Fleming, Paula Manalo and Zoe Bradbury – authors of the newly released second edition of The Guide for Beginning Farmers is “a novice, or new entrant into agriculture.” To be precise, it is a certain kind of new entrant into agriculture: one who was not raised to farm and who has no family farm to inherit but who is unconventionally and some would say irrationally choosing to become a farmer, no matter his or her lack of education and resources. Touches of madness are not uncommon among greenhorns. Gutfuls of passion aren’t either.

In the authors’ words, The Guide for Beginning Farmers is “part pep-talk, part institutional index, part career-planning guide” for greenhorns. It is a work in progress. While the authors seek a publishing house willing to expand it into a full-length book, The Guide serves as a “first, early stab” at compiling resources for young people who hear the call to farm but have no place to dig in. The Guide gives them long-ish lists of apprenticeships and mentorships; land trusts and FarmLink programs that help new farmers find land; books on organic cultivation; books on smart business; local, state and federal loans and grants for starting farms; even consumer and food activist organizations that support sustainable agriculture, food access and farmworkers’ rights. There are plenty of places to begin.

Reading through the breadth and number of these lists gives the sense that The Guide is still very incomplete. There must be many more manuals, funding sources, apprenticeship listings and unclaimed parcels of land than the authors have been able to compile. There are people farming wisely and organizations supporting their efforts in every state in this country. It seems to me that programs and policies to incubate new farmers already exist; they’re not extensive, they’re not all tested and they’re not widely known, but they are ideas to try and replicate. Books on how to manage a sustainable and profitable farm are in print. Innovative, successful models of urban and rural food production that meet the specific needs of our time are out there. It seems to me, then, that what we really lack in the movement to create millions of new farmers is awareness. There aren’t too many Americans asking for a Guide for Beginning Farmers. There might be more if city people who condemn corn syrup and demand good food also demand that incentives be put in place to make farming an economically and socially viable profession. Or if they speak up and declare that farming is radical; that farmers, no matter how they do it, are heroes. The first obstacle in creating millions of new farmers is not a shortage of land and capital; twenty-somethings have too little farm experience and too many student loans to buy land anyway. The first obstacle is getting agriculture onto the minds of twenty-somethings before they decide that medicine or banking or pop music or drug dealing is the only way to ensure a “respectable” quality of life.

Hence what I admire most about The Guide for Beginning Farmers is not its references to so many websites but the way it reads, at times, like a Manifesto for Beginning Farmers. In future editions, I suggest the authors play up the joy of growing food and the role of farmers in any sustainable, healthy and just society. They’ve already begun it on Serve Your Country Food, a website The Greenhorns have produced to document, connect and support the work of young farmers. Manifestos are risky, but they’re also exciting. Excitement grabs attention and starts movements. We’ll never know if the existing programs for new farmers or the ones now being proposed are worth their weight if young people don’t demand the chance to try them out.

This post is part of Gordon Jenkins’s Young Farmers Unite series, where he writes and invites others to write on the challenges young farmers face, and how we can support new farmers at their profession.

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3 thoughts on “The Guide for Beginning Farmers”

Driven by hunger pains and fed information from the internet, the next generation of high tech survival farmer will use the new GMO’ed potato, corn and other veggies in solar oriented electronically controlled greenhouses. The new ultra-cheap LED lights will provide grow lights. Gone are the days of “Five Acres and Independence” with horse and cart, and in the new world of web communication and solar cells, windmills and geothermal heat storage, along with the now perfected Swedish “dry” composter waterless solar powered toilets, solar powered house lighting, using LED’s, Cooking by microwave, and super-insulated solar oriented homes, a homesteader will face little in the way of hardships. Solar refrigeration, without the use of electric motors is alive and well in Africa, and as soon as the shysters and shylocks of the fridge world are exposed, we will have cheap efficient homestead systems, very different from the glorious metal and gadge-laced crap we have in our homes, but cheep low power fridges none the less, and adequate for homestead uses. Aquaponics, the cheapest, fastest way to fresh greens and fresh fish for protein in the diet is very well known and publicized, and new pages showing chicken rearing methods on small scale appear almost weekly on the web. Growing hemp for fiber and food may re-appear as laws modernize, and a new nation of fit, computer savvy self-reliant and well educated Americans will evolve. The (GRD) great republican depression must winnow out the fat assed, unwilling and unable folks, and it will, the few survivors rising to the top as usual, will remain democratic, but prefer barter over all other forms of trade, avoiding the capitalists haven of printed money, and the shylocks and systers will have no power either! A new world is dawning, some of us will be excluded, some of us sacrificed, and some will live in a pollution free utopia as never before!